Two years after the International Olympic Committee decided that Sochi would host the 2014 Winter Olympics, photographer Rob Hornstra and journalist Arnold van Bruggen decided to undertake an ambitious project of “slow journalism,” filming, photographing, and capturing oral histories in Sochi over four years.
Though the artists included in this exhibition look to history and ancestry to construct identity, their perspectives are not documentary or historical. Their work is exploratory, propositional, and contemporary, and challenges others to consider themselves in the same way. To see the issue of identity so deeply rooted in the oeuvre of even just these eight international artists suggests that we are at a moment where this discussion is relevant.
